ARL Kongress - Evaluating faster planning processes - trading off planning time and societal value

Abstract

Infrastructure is planned and then constructed or modified to meet changing societal needs. However, this construction or modification is sometimes completed later than expected, resulting in users and other stakeholders experiencing unmet needs for unnecessarily long periods. This delay is related to long duration of the planning process, length of time during which infrastructure is to be used and uncertainty associated with change in societal needs over time. Responsiveness of organisations is their ability to meet changing needs more quickly. Improvement in responsiveness of organisations enables speeding up the planning process and is thus likely to yield substantial benefits for society. We propose an ex-ante evaluation framework that examines the tradeoff between the societal value of planning outcomes and the time that it takes to provide them. For a major infrastructure project case study, the A15 highway extension in the eastern part of the Canton of Zürich, the impact of responsiveness on meeting societal needs over time is evaluated. The evaluation is completed for eight situations using owner costs and user delay costs considering uncertain number of road users and uncertain completion date of the highway. We define situations based on an organisation’s responsiveness. We quantify the costs and benefits of infrastructure projects to assess the effectiveness in meeting these objectives. As the situations differ in responsiveness, we can observe a trend that with growing responsiveness, there is a growth in societal benefits. However, the framework enables identification of improvements in responsiveness having less effective results; this shows that simply reducing time duration of a planning process can, but does not necessarily, lead to better outcomes for society.